TWO women have been jailed for preventing a mother from seeing her children.

TWO women have been jailed for preventing a mother from seeing her children.

The 67-year-old grandmother and her daughter were each given a three-month sentence by a judge at Salford County Court.

The court was told they had played a key role in depriving the children of their mother's care for two-and-a-half years.

The mother of the children, who had been living in the Lancashire area, was tricked into going to Pakistan in July 2003.

When she managed to return to Britain in September 2005 her husband and his family hid the children from her.

She took court action to get access to the children but her husband refused to co-operate. In November last year he was jailed for 13 months for failing to attend a court hearing and hiding the children.

Now his mother and sister have been jailed for failing to attend a hearing to establish the whereabouts of the children.

The father was also given an additional one-month jail sentence for failing to produce the children's passports to the courts on four occasions.

For legal reasons the family cannot be identified.

The children are a girl, now aged five, and a boy, aged three. Their parents were married in Pakistan in 1998. Their mother was not able to obtain entry to Britain until 2001. Her daughter was born at the end of 2001.

In January 2003 their father went back to Pakistan and the boy was born a few months later.

While he was away the children's mother was subjected to `cruel and inappropriate treatment' by her in-laws in with whom she was living.

In July 2003, the children's mother was taken to Pakistan by her father-in-law and given the impression that her mother was ill or had died.

Once she arrived she was effectively kept in the custody of her in-laws while the children's father returned to Britain. But their mother was stranded in Pakistan as her passport had expired and she did not have a visa.

When she was finally discovered by her own family in Pakistan in September 2003 she was suffering from tuberculosis, malnutrition and anaemia and had to spend three months in hospital.

Her children were living with her husband's parents in Lancashire and their aunt was resident at the home too. In September 2005, the mother, with the help of the authorities, managed to get back to Britain.

Several contact visits were set up with the children but later that month they went missing.